of his shop he abruptly put it back in his pocket.
He looked at his watch. It was three. “No, it’s too late. And no one will come out in this rain,” he reflected, walking across the cobbled street to the bookshop.
Hope Lawrence was wiping down the wooden coffee bar and Sloan was ringing up sales behind the back counter. Hugo waved at him, Sloan waved back and Hope began to automatically prepare a double cappuccino. Hugo slid onto a stool and brooded at a copy of the Boston Globe as Hope produced her usual stream of cheerful chatter. Something was nagging at Hugo. And he wanted a cigarette. If Pamela were still working for him, he could get one from her.
Laura’s return troubled him not at all. He’d already spoken with her over the phone, told her about Garda’s visit and promised to cook her a welcome home dinner that night in his own kitchen. She’d asked him at once about why he’d dismissed Pamela and he’d replied at once and frankly that it was because Pamela seemed to have developed a crush on him. These were not words calculated to do anything but please and soothe a worried girlfriend and Hugo realized with a start that although he had ostensibly given up continuous access to Pamela out of respect for his friendship with Sloan, Laura provided an even stronger reason for exiling the willowy beauty from his immediate realm.
But who deserved the real blame for what had occurred? It wasn’t Pamela. It was himself, for being a wise guy. He retraced the sequence of events as they had unfolded. First Pamela had returned to Random Point after a year away. At which point she’d been shocked and violently jealous to find that Sloan’s new assistant was the remarkably beautiful Hope Spencer Lawrence. Desperately, Pamela had asked Sloan to let her exchange work places with Hope, putting her in the bookshop and Hope in Hugo’s antiques shop across the street. But Hugo had firmly objected, on the grounds that, charming as she was, Hope talked too much to bear as an assistant.
Also, he took exception to Pamela deciding who was to work for him and being so disloyal as to want to leave him and punished her for her temerity with a good spanking, thereafter behaving towards his employee in a fashion that could only be described as Gothic.
Hugo had been cold and harsh to Pamela for several weeks, overworking and stretching her to the limit in every possible way. The result was that she fell in love with him and when the feeling built to such a fever pitch that it could no longer be ignored by the sensitive girl, she declared herself to him, with some embarrassment and he was forced to do the confession the honor it deserved. He made love to her, in his usual style, which only inflamed her more. The situation rapidly becoming untenable, in a panic of conscience and common sense, Hugo decided that the only possible solution was to dismiss Pamela.
He told himself he was actually doing Pamela a favor. Damaris had promised to make her a partner if Pamela designed for the shop, and this after all, was what she had gone to school for. But after seeing her beautiful eyes filled with tears yesterday and knowing that it was his fault, he spent the entire afternoon feeling restless, guilty, angry and desperately aroused by the tall girl’s passion for him.
He finished his coffee, borrowed an umbrella from Sloan and walked back across the village in the rain to Damaris’ shop. Pamela was standing outside the shop under the bottle green awning in a beige wool dress, moodily smoking a cigarette. She gave a start at seeing him, followed by a trembling smile.
“Can you get away for an hour?” he asked without preamble.
“Yes,” she replied, crushing her cigarette underfoot and running inside to get her raincoat and umbrella. A young woman who lived by the weather report, Pamela had on smart black thigh high boots that disappeared under her skirt and gave Hugo a romantic notion.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said, leading her several blocks across the village and then along the brook that ran behind it. The rain had lessened to a fine mist and the gusts of wind had died down. “Do you know about the marble summer house?” he asked. Pamela shook her head. “Very few people do,” he told her as they walked along the gravelly bank.
This open structure, nearly a hundred years old, overgrown with ivy and lined with marble benches stood in the woods about a half-mile out of town.
“What am I going to do with you?” he asked, drawing her to sit down beside him on the driest bench seat he could find. Taking her gloved hands in his, he kissed her full mouth lightly. Then he peeled off her gloves, examined the palms of her hands and kissed them. His act of tenderness washed through her like a balm, soothing away all the hurt and confusion of the last week.
“You’re a willful girl who doesn’t know what’s good for her,” Hugo scolded, slowly drawing her down across his lap. He curved one hand around her tiny waist and used the other to push up the skirt of her raincoat and wool dress. Pamela had on black panties of Calais lace through which her pearly flesh gleamed. These he promptly rolled down to her thighs, which caused her to gasp as the chill air touched her satiny skin. Then he began to spank her and the sound of his slaps rang through the woods for many minutes to follow. “Players ought to be able to separate spanking from sex,” he reasoned during a pause, as he smoothed his palm across her bare pink cheeks and white thighs above the boot tops. “You never should have come on to me the way you did that day in the store room.”
“I know,” she assented meekly, and was duly rewarded with additional spanking, this time on her tender, creamy thighs. “Oh god! That really hurts!” she cried, wriggling on his lap. He caught her hand to her waist and held her fast, but proceeded to again spank her rhythmically, first on one cheek, then the other, until both were colored rose.
Presently he pulled her back up into a sitting position. “No, get those off,” he told her sternly as he saw her attempting to pull her panties back up. “You heard me,” he told her, briskly assisting in this operation, matter of factly folding them up, putting them in his jacket pocket and then pushing her back down on the bench, on her back. “Get your skirt up,” he told her, yanking his zipper down and freeing a condom from its foil. Straddling her he captured her wrists and drew them together up over her head as she lay looking up at him in passive though breathless expectation.
“Keep your hands above your head,” he told her. Her complete submissiveness to his will caused his cock to throb like an unruly fire hose in his hand as he nonetheless coolly rolled the rubber down over its lengthy shaft.
Before penetrating her, Hugo paused to undo the top two chunky buttons of her dress. Pulling it open he squeezed each small, firm round breast through the black lace under wire brassiere that supported it so elegantly. She gave a little whimper and he responded by spanking her breasts once each, which caused Pamela to gasp. He pinched her nipples lightly as she gazed at him with huge black eyes.
“Don’t take your eyes from mine,” he instructed her, guiding his cock between her creamy labia and penetrating her one inch at a time. This requirement making the act unbearably erotic, Pamela succumbed to the confluence of stimulations to which she was currently being subjected and whimpered her way through the first face-to-face orgasm she had ever experienced. As he felt her climax, squeezing his imprisoned cock madly, Hugo also orgasmed copiously before pulling out, rolling off and lying on his back beside her on the broad marble bench. It was natural at that moment, after making themselves more decent, to loll decadently on the cool, moist stone, gazing out at the rain drenched woods all around them.
“Cigarette?” she asked, lighting one. He took a puff then handed it back to her and relaced his fingers under his head.
“Hugo, thank you for not ignoring me today,” Pamela said softly. “Between Garda’s leaving and Laura’s return you still managed to find this perfect hour for me. I will never doubt you again.”
“I want you to get over me, not go into
